jlynch
Posts by this author
March 4, 2007
March 5th
1575 - Birth of William Oughtred, English mathematician
1748 - Birth of Jonas C. Dryander, Swedish botanist
1827 - Death of Pierre-Simon Laplace, French mathematician
1827 - Death of Alessandro Volta, Italian physicist
1904 - Nikola Tesla describes the process of ball lightning…
March 4, 2007
The New York Times is featuring a discussion of the evolution of religious belief. While the article is largely a discussion of Scott Atran's work, Dawkins, Dennett and Harris ("They have been portrayed as an unholy trinity of neo-atheists, promoting their secular world view with a fervor that…
March 3, 2007
March 4th
1675 - John Flamsteed appointed first Astronomer Royal of England.
1774 - First sighting of Orion Nebula by William Herschel.
1822 - Birth of Jules Antoine Lissajous, French mathematician
1835 - Birth of John Hughlings Jackson, English neurologist
1847 - Birth of Karl Bayer, Austrian…
March 3, 2007
On February 25th, the STEREO B spacecraft captured a lunar transit across the face of the Sun. Click here for the impressive QT movie.
March 2, 2007
The Lay of the Trilobite
May Kendall (1861 - 1943)
A mountain's giddy height I sought,
Because I could not find
Sufficient vague and mighty thought
To fill my mighty mind;
And as I wandered ill at ease,
There chanced upon my sight
A native of Silurian seas,
An ancient Trilobite.
So calm, so…
March 2, 2007
March 3rd
1703 - Death of Robert Hooke, English scientist
1800 - Birth of Heinrich Georg Bronn, German geologist
1845 - Birth of Georg Cantor, German mathematician
1918 - Birth of Arthur Kornberg, American biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1988 - Death of Sewall…
March 2, 2007
Arizonans won't see the full lunar eclipse scheduled for Saturday because it reaches totality around 4:20 p.m. here, two hours before the sun will set.
Ah well. We'll just have to wait for August 27th.
March 2, 2007
Ann Coulter's one woman crusade to bring civility back to American politics took a turn for the worst today. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, she had this to say:
I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns…
March 1, 2007
March 2nd
1729 - Death of Francesco Bianchini, Italian philosopher and scientist
1779 - Birth of Joel Roberts Poinsett, American statesman and botanist
1791 - Long-distance communication speeds up with the unveiling of a semaphore machine in Paris
1830 - Death of Samuel Thomas von Sömmering,…
February 28, 2007
As Razib notes, Arthur Schlesinger has died at the age of 89. I like this quote from his New York Times obit, if only because I feel the same way and used to spend a lot of time as a kid wondering in the same way:
Mr. Schlesinger saw life as a walk through history. He wrote that he could not…
February 28, 2007
March 1st
1597 - Birth of Jean-Charles de la Faille, Belgian mathematician
1610 - Birth of John Pell, English mathematician
1697 - Death of Francesco Redi, Italian physician
1862 - Death of Peter Barlow, English mathematician
1884 - Death of Isaac Todhunter, English mathematician
1896 - Henri…
February 28, 2007
Things you can do with a jet fighter in the Swiss Alps.
February 27, 2007
February 28th
1704 - Birth of Louis Godin, French astronomer
1857 - Death of André Dumont, Belgian geologist
1878 - Birth of Pierre Fatou, French mathematician
1896 - Birth of Philip Showalter Hench, American physician, Nobel laureate
1901 - Birth of Linus Pauling, American chemist, Nobel laureate…
February 27, 2007
The New York Times is reporting that in 24 states beekeepers are noticing that
their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation's most profitable…
February 27, 2007
GrrlScientist had this first, but it is such a perfect encapsulation of the sheer stupidity and arrogance of the current administration that it is worth posting again. Olbermann on Rice's statement on Fox News that rewriting the 2002 Congressional authorization for the use of force in Iraq…
February 27, 2007
February 27th
1899 - Birth of Charles Best, Canadian medical scientist
1904 - Birth of Yulii Borisovich Khariton, Russian physicist
1923 - Birth of David H. Hubel, Canadian neuroscientist, Nobel Prize laureate
1930 - Birth of Paul von Ragué Schleyer, American chemist
1936 - Death of Ivan Pavlov,…
February 26, 2007
WaPo reports:
Five Western governors [California, Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico and Washington] agreed yesterday on a plan to cut their states' emissions of gases linked to global warming and to establish a regional carbon-trading system, though they stopped short of saying how drastically they will…
February 26, 2007
February 26th
1638 - Death of Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac, French mathematician
1786 - Birth of François Arago, French mathematician
1799 - Birth of Émile Clapeyron, French engineer and physicist
1814 - Birth of Charles Joseph Sainte-Claire Deville, French geologist
1935 - Robert Watson-…
February 25, 2007
Internet users with a home wireless connection check news and e-mail more than users with just a wired broadband connection, according to new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. (source)
February 25, 2007
February 25th
1682 - Birth of Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist
1919 - Birth of Karl H. Pribram, Austrian neuroscientist
1950 - Death of George Minot, American physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1953 - Death of Sergei Winogradsky, Russian scientist
1971 -…
February 24, 2007
After being defeated by the French two weeks ago, the Irish hammered the luckless English 43-13 to keep their Triple Crown hopes alive. Victory over Scotland at Edinburgh on March 10th will mean the title is theirs.
February 24, 2007
According to this paper, a hidden Markov model of the divergence between humans and chimps finds "a very recent speciation time of human-chimp (4.1 ± 0.4 million years)". This would put the last common ancestor with Pan after a previously
reported date of between 4.98 and 7.02 million years. (…
February 23, 2007
February 24th
1799 - Death of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German physicist
1810 - Death of Henry Cavendish, English scientist
1812 - Death of Etienne-Louis Malus, French physicist and mathematician
1856 - Death of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Russian mathematician
A relatively quiet day. But in…
February 23, 2007
Over at Retrospectacle, Shelley briefly mentions a quote that William F. Buckley has been mumbling for aeons now.
"I'm taken with the reply of an elderly scientific scholar to an exuberant young skeptic. 'I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular…
February 23, 2007
February 23rd
1583 - Birth of Jean-Baptiste Morin, French scientist
1603 - Death of Andrea Cesalpino, Italian philosopher, physician, and botanist
1855 - Death of Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician, astronomer, and physicist
1922 - Death of Albert Victor Bäcklund, Swedish physicist
1924 -…